Thoughts on Twitter

Today I read a post by Pernille Ripp explaining why she unfollowed everyone on her Twitter account. You can find it here.

To be honest, I haven’t been on Twitter as much as I probably should be. And I think a big part of that is the superficial engagement she talks about. We see something we like – we follow without a second thought.

How many people on Twitter do we actually engage with regularly? How many of the people we follow have we actually taken the time to engage with more than a simple ‘like’ or retweet?

I think part of the problem is that we are trying to make up for the fact that Twitter is such a brief platform (with only 140 characters allowed) by being sneaky. We post elsewhere and provide links to content 10,000 times the size. We make use of URL shorteners to squeeze more content in. So we as consumers are forced to spend at least 2-3 mins per tweet with the linked content if we are to truly engage with the content available to us.

Some might argue that is the point. We follow others to have content streamed to our feed that we want to see. Or is it? Isn’t Twitter meant to be a communication channel? Or perhaps that is our choice.

Treat it as your NewsFeed, or your own personal broadcaster, or as a way to chat and build relationships with people all over the world who you otherwise would never have met. That is the beauty of it I suppose – it is what you make of it.

As for me, I think I need to go through my ever expanding ‘following’ list and make sure I am making the best use of the platform at my fingertips.